A Comparative Study Of ECONOMY-AS-ORGANISM Metaphors In English And Chinese

With the development of cognitive linguistics, the perception of metaphor has changed drastically in recent years. In the traditional rhetoric, metaphor is regarded only as a figure of speech, while in cognitive linguistics it is studied as systems of human conceptualization, operating in human thought and cognition and, at the same time, surfacing in everyday language in a systematic manner. As an important cognitive tool concerned with the way we construct reality, metaphor is so important to help us understand the world that it has become the metaphor we live by.This thesis is intended to apply the contemporary cognitive theory of metaphor to a more specific genre, namely economic discourse, which, for its complex and abstract nature, is rife with metaphors. From a cognitive perspective, it is virtually impossible to think of or talk about economy in any serious way without conceptualizing it metaphorically, because metaphor is "the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning" (Lakoff, 1993: 244).